Growing Up A Sid-Thesizer

Of all the things the Commodore could do, one of its most touted traits was its musical capabilities. I remember being mesmerized by the sounds coming from an old Vic-20 at a friend's house, then I HAD to have one. I later progressed to the Commodore 64 and was introuced to Quantum-Link by a friend of mine and my life changed forever.

I arrived at Quamtum-Link just as an area called "Music Connection" was debuting. Later of course, the "Music Connection" was upgraded to "Super Q." In this area, not only could you chat with your buddies, but there were DJ's (called QDJ's) spinning music that people had uploaded into the file libraries. Any sound file uploaded into the libraries was available to be played. Since SuperQ is no more, for those wondering, the command was "//mus filename."

I hung out in the Music Studio for hours each night, and racked up my first $350 bill (quite hefty for a high school freshman.) As time went on I wanted to make my own music, and ordered the book "Compute's Music System For The Commodore 128 and 64" by Craig Chamberlain. Then came the fun. I spent hours after school and nights making music. A few months later, I ordered the SID Symphony cartridge from CMD, and that added an additional 3 voices for a total of 6. Craig's program was complimented by an add-on called "Stereo Editor" by Robert Stoerrle that made editing SIDs, title blocks and words files super easy. (Side note, Robert was infamous for writing the "Omega-Q" set of utilities.) The best player was of course Stereoplayer 10.3 by Mark Dickenson.

I created somewhere between 100-120 released SIDs and had 30-50 or so on disks that I started and never finished. Unfortunately, I sold my 128D and all software and I have lost the majority of my collection. (If anybody knows where to find a SID Symphony, lemme know...) I even had worked on an improved Stereoplayer which I dubbed "UltraSID" and released a demo version but that has disappeared. The SID player I developed played the entire archive file (MSW, SAL, WPL, etc...) while still in the archive and not dissolved.

As I mentioned earlier, most of my SIDs have been lost. However, a fellow SID artist, Dave Strauss (LI Dave) has saved thousands of these treasures. You can find a ton of SID files at his site which is called "The Q-Link SID Archives.

There are several software packages that allow you to play SID files on your computer:

  • SidPlay - The standalone player for old C64 tunes, both games & demo music and Q-Link sid files. Versions available for Windows, DOS, Mac, OS/2, Linux, Amiga, and BeOS.
  • SidAmp - A plugin for WinAmp 2.0 or higher. WinAmp is one of the net's most popular audio applications, with native support for MPEG, MIDI, and Wave audio. The SidAmp plugin allows it to play Commodore sid files as well.
  • Netscape Plugin - The best solution for those of you that want to listen to sids directly off this page. Just download the zip file, open it up, and move the npsid.dll file to your plugins directory. (Usually something like \Program Files\Netscape\Communicator\Program\Plugins\ or \Program Files\Internet Explorer\Plugins\.)

Now that you have the plugin, here are a few of my personal SIDs. Please keep in mind that most of these were stereo, and some don't sound quite right as mono files. ;>


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